Stranger Things: How Dacre Montgomery Brought Billy the Bully to Life

Villainous Billy, who storms into the second season of Stranger Things like a bat out of hell, is a perfectly 1980s creation. The rogue mullet, the hair-metal intro, the dangling earring—they’re all pieced together and brought to life by Dacre Montgomery, an Australian actor who handily swapped his Perth-born accent for an American one for the supernatural series. Over the course of the season, Billy becomes the high-school outsider you love to hate, a denim-clad brute cut from the cloth of films like The Lost Boys and Pretty in Pink. He terrorizes his step-sister, Max (Sadie Sink), her new friend Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), and his classmate Steve Harrington (Joe Keery), simply because he can—though we later find out that his father is the source of his bubbling angst.

Billy arrives on the scene with one of the show’s most memorable character introductions. He swerves into the high-school parking lot in his growling car, then steps out to survey his new kingdom as “Rock You Like a Hurricane” by the Scorpions snarls in the background. As Montgomery remembers, he shot that scene in late November 2016. The Duffer brothers—who created Stranger Things—were having trouble picking just the right song to go with it.

“Most of the cast and crew were out of town for Thanksgiving, but I was in Atlanta, which is a long way from Perth, so I couldn’t go home,” Montgomery says. “The two Duffer brothers and their partners invited me around. The five of us spent Thanksgiving together, discussing that scene and what music we could put to that opening.”

So the brothers can be flexible—though some things were already set in stone before Montgomery got to set, like that mullet. “I was all in, and I spent about an hour and a half in the trailer getting that look pasted onto my head [every day],” Montgomery says. “The back and sides is the wig, and then the top is my hair.”

To get into Billy’s headspace, the actor also went out a few times in his signature jean jacket (a vintage piece from the 80s). Certain elements, like the faint lipstick mark on the collar and its scent, helped him ground the role, reminding him of 80s-era hand-me-downs from his dad: “You can smell everything. Every party.”

But while Billy’s jacket got to go for a spin in the real world, other items stayed put. “The pants were far too tight to wear out,” he says with a laugh.

In the show, those tight pants are a constant, as are the cigarettes Billy’s always puffing on. Montgomery, who’s not a smoker, had to learn how to make it look convincing. But the Stranger Things cast doesn’t use Hollywood-standard herbal cigarettes: they use real Marlboro Reds. Why? “The smoke plays so much thicker onscreen,” says Montgomery. Plus, he’s fairly certain that co-stars David Harbour and Winona Ryder “just wanted to smoke real cigarettes.” Over the course of a five-hour shoot, Montgomery would go through “three or four packs,” then wake up the next day with a smoke-induced hangover.

“Arguably the first four episodes, it looks terrible on my part,” Montgomery says. “It wasn’t until Shawn Levy [a Stranger Things executive producer and director] came on and was directing [Episodes] 3 and 4 that he said, ‘Look, man, this isn’t how you smoke.’ And he gave me all these lessons.”

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Smoking inability aside, Montgomery had plenty of opportunities to bring his own ideas to the Stranger Things world. The scene where he screams “Say it!” in Max’s face in Episode 2 was a day-of decision, as was one of the moments when he lustily seduces Karen Wheeler (Cara Buono). That comes during a delightfully absurd scene in the final episode of Season 2, in which Karen’s romance-novel dreams come to life when Billy appears at her front door—his shirt deeply unbuttoned. He ends it by taking a cookie from her jar and eating it, a moment that wasn’t in the script: “I said to the Duffers, ‘Boys, let’s just be cheeky—eat a cookie.’”

It was also Montgomery’s idea to include the scene with Billy’s furious father, played by Will Chase. Without it, “you don’t understand why he’s a dick,” Montgomery explains. He remembers persuading the Duffers to humanize Billy, so they wrote that scene—in which his father hurls slurs and roughs him up.

“I can’t just play bad, because nobody’s just bad,” Montgomery says. “It’s funny, because today I’ve gotten a number of messages about that scene in particular with the dad—people all around the world saying, ‘I responded to this scene.’”

His hateful father might also retroactively explain Billy’s explosive feelings about Lucas. In Episode 4, he snarls at Max that there‘s “a certain type of people in this world that you stay away from . . . that kid is one of them.”

It’s a subtle dog whistle for racism, but Montgomery sees the characterization differently. “Fundamentally, he’s threatened,” Montgomery says of Billy. “I think he does love and care about his sister . . . he is becoming extremely angry because of love, I think, and the way that anger comes out obviously is directed toward Lucas because he is interacting the most out of all the kids with Sadie [Max]. I don’t think it has anything to do with race.”

As an Australian, Montgomery felt the need to research Billy’s West Coast background and try to suss out views toward race during the time period. He came away from it thinking that Billy’s “fear of emasculation” by both Steve Harrington and Lucas is the character’s dominant theme. “He’s never had a conversation with this kid. He’s seen this kid from afar. I don’t think it has anything to do with his skin color.”

By the end of the season, it appears that Billy and Max finally have reached a mutual sort of understanding. However, Billy still doesn’t know the truth about the Upside Down and the crazier elements of Hawkins. Montgomery can’t help but reference 80s pop culture when he theorizes what could have happened if he had found out; maybe Billy would have gotten pulled to “the dark side” like in Star Wars, or would have fended off the villains, like in Indiana Jones. “Maybe then that becomes the thing that brings him together with the kids.”

Though it hasn’t yet been confirmed whether Billy will return for the next installment of the series, Montgomery does have one request of the all-knowing Duffers: “A romantic interest, because that would humanize him even more. To see those qualities come out would show a really different side to him.”

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Courtesy of Comedy Central.

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